Against Forgetting Yourself
Life is long, if you know how to use it.
“Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.”―Marcus Aurelius
“Life is long, if you know how to use it.” - Seneca
A friend told me it had been months since he last read a book. The timing was easy to trace. Around then he’d started a new job, bought a car, and entered a relationship. His life had filled up quickly with things that looked like progress. He had done well. I was proud of him. But somewhere in that orderliness, the things he once loved slipped out. Reading. Creating. Exploring ideas for no reason other than curiosity. Poof. Gone. Time to himself felt weirdly indulgent.
What replaced them wasn’t misery at first. It was momentum. Schedules. Expectations. A sense of being needed. Over time, though, his life began to loop. Work fed the week. The week fed the month. The month fed the year. He described it as depressive because nothing felt like it was his anymore. At least when he read and created, there was uncertainty. Discovery. A sense that he was moving toward something he couldn’t fully name. Now his energy went toward meeting other people’s KPIs. He joked that the gods were punishing him for succeeding.
Some 2000 years ago, the Stoics understood this pattern well. Seneca, the great Stoic philosopher, wrote, “It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”. We give our attention away piece by piece until our inner life runs on what others demand of us. Status, money, praise, routine. None of these are harmful on their own. The problem appears when they become the only things shaping our days.
He didn’t hate his job. There were parts he genuinely enjoyed. Competence. Progress. Even pride. But at the end of the day, none of it accumulated into something that belonged to him. He had no personal project to watch compound, or genuinely enjoy for the sake of it. Nothing that carried his fingerprint. Success had crowded out his agency.
The Stoics would say he’d confused what sustains life with what gives it direction. They drew a hard line between what is necessary and what is sufficient. Food, work, shelter, relationships matter. They don’t complete us. Completion comes from living in accordance with what we value and are naturally inclined to do as part of our vocation.
People forget themselves in a not so obvious way, until you look at it in retrospect. No single decision does the damage. It happens through reasonable trade-offs made repeatedly. One skipped walk becomes a season without movement. One busy month becomes a year without reading. One postponed idea becomes a habit of postponement. Life compounds towards the negative if we don’t decide what gets protected. Rome didn’t fall in a day.
I live with this tension daily. Every day asks me to forget what I like in favor of what’s required. Every day offers a convincing argument for hesitation. I have to remind myself that if I stop writing, stop reading, stop moving my body, stop spending time outdoors, I won’t feel relieved. I’ll feel anxious, lost and restless. These habits carried me through darker periods. They steadied me when I had little else to lean on. They still do. My job has demands, yes. My inner life has demands too, and ignoring them comes with a cost I’ve already paid enough times to let happen again. Responsibility to the world doesn’t cancel responsibility to the self.
Many people don’t understand that what’s actually lost when we forget ourselves isn’t the hobby. It’s the state of mind the hobby creates. Reading restores curiosity. Writing restores ownership over thought. Movement restores agency over the body. These acts remind us that time isn’t only something to be spent; it’s something to inhabit- to use, to usher our becoming. Without them, days become full yet meaningless.
I’ve learned that discipline matters here, though not in the gritty sense people like to advertise. I don’t want you to think of it as more intensity or self-punishment. It’s simply about protection of higher forms of fun- what the Stoics liked to call leisure. For if I don’t set boundaries around what matters to me, and gives me the most fun, my time gets claimed by default. Discipline becomes the means by which I refuse to let everything meaningful be treated as optional.
None of this requires ideal circumstances. The Stoics trained under pressure. They assumed interruptions. They assumed fatigue. Their advice wasn’t to wait, but to act within constraints. Do the smallest version of what matters. Do it consistently. Let it set the tone for the day.
Yes, I’ll wake up early. While the town sleeps and the emails are silent, I’ll steal that hour for my workout. That pain is mine. That struggle is mine.
Yes, I’ll eat lunch alone sometimes. I’ll look antisocial. I will shovel food down quickly. Why? Because that twenty minutes with a book is the oxygen I need to feed my brain.
Yes, I’ll sacrifice the happy hour. I’ll miss the fun of dancing away into the night. I’ll sit in my room on a Friday night and write, or think, or simply stare at the wall until an idea comes.
Yes, I’ll run when I’d rather sleep in. Because the fatigue of the body is better than the fatigue of the spirit. Because, as Marcus Aurelius wrote, “It’s a shame for the soul to be the first to give way in this life, when the body does not give up.”
I make these choices because waiting for the right mood has taught me nothing gets done that way. Time doesn’t open up politely. It fills itself with requests, errands, conversations, obligations that seemed harmless when accepted one by one. I have to be aggressive and ruthless. What I care about has to go first, or it gets lost in the chaos. It’s as Charles Bukowski wrote,
“I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen but as the years wasted on nothing ever did unless I caused it.”
There are warning signs when forgetting yourself has already begun. Days feel busy yet empty. Weekends pass without memory. Irritation creeps in when someone asks how life is going. Envy appears toward people absorbed and winning in something they chose. These are your signals.
Reclaiming yourself doesn’t mean quitting your job or restructuring your life. That’s foolish. It starts by naming one activity that reminds you who you are when no one needs anything from you. Then you place it early, in a recurring block of time that belongs to no one else. You do it imperfectly- allowing yourself some mediocrity. You stop negotiating with mood. Over time, this creates a private center that work and obligations can’t touch. You’ll feel whole again.
For people rarely burn out from work alone. They get exhausted from living without anything that feels chosen- theirs. They get exhausted when the things they own end up owning them. Think about it, when was the last time you did something for yourself? That’s why we must treat our interests and curiosities not as extras to be fitted in around work, but as the essential work around which we fit our jobs. If we don’t, we risk arriving at the end of our days having been excellent employees, but absolute strangers to ourselves.
The Way Back
Here is how I get back on track when I feel myself slipping, …
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